Ask HN: Is there a Long Tenure Red Flag for hiring as well? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a Long Tenure Red Flag for hiring as well?

21 pointstravisgriggs9 comments

Yesterday saw a good discussion of Short Tenure as a Red Flag (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33309342)

I'm curious if there's a complement to this on the longer side. At what point is a person penalized in the hiring/interviewing process if they have been a single company too long? What is too long? What (if anything) should a person in this boat do to mitigate this? Does it pay to break up a 10 year service at a given company into a series of 3ish year roles in the company as if they were different jobs?

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Recruiter here.

For permanent employees, the answer is 'yes', unfortunately.

In recruiting, optimal time for tenure is between 2-5 years - thought to be enough time to get substantive work done, remove most doubts on capability of working with others, demonstrate loyalty to the company, and reciprocal trust from employer back to you.

Any longer than you may start to move into institutionalised territory, especially if there has also been no career progression during that time. Over 10 years at the same employer, I think recruiters will make note of it, but not immediately reject. 15 years plus, and recruiters will look for others, whilst keeping you in a 'call later' pile.

This is all biased but shortcuts is what we need to do operate in the world. Advice for folks wanting to keep optimal market attraction - 2-5 years tenure on perm contracts

I am really not certain whether recruiters genuinely see their job as filtering rather than sorting, or whether it's a façade.

Since you cannot generally hire the same people for full time positions as the next recruiter, how can you believe you have general advice on choosing the best?

You have to reject most people regardless of merit, yet most people will be hired elsewhere. By definition the criteria they need to meet, and do meet, will not be yours.

That's why recruiters shouldn't be the ones who make hiring decision

Fortunately, they're not!

Recruiters make more money when people are jumping around every 2 years. Favoring clients who make you the most money isn't uncommon.

I don’t personally consider long tenure a problem, but if I were interviewing a candidate who had been in the same role, or even just worked at the same company, for more than 10 years or so, I’d ask them why they were entertaining a change.

More generally, a long time ago I was advised to change up something about my job every two - three years — take on a new set of responsibilities, change teams, lead a community-of-interest group, etc. - to keep things fresh. I’ve found that to be good advice, both to avoid feeling like I’m not making any progress at work, and to avoid appearing to be unmotivated or inflexible. YMMV.

* Edit - I guess I should add I’m currently a people manager and even as an individual contributor did a lot of interviewing. *

I've had tenures ranging from 6 months to 10 years as well as 2 years not working. At no time did I ever had trouble finding a backend dev job that I was interested in taking though I did switch tech stacks and/or do some full-stack work. There's always work for qualified candidates regardless of 'red flags'. I'm also quite old and never had an issue with that either.

10 years is OK, as long as there’s career progression, and the more recent roles have accomplishments that align directly to the new role that’s being applied for. Example: a 10 year tenure that began as a sys admin and grew into an AI director role is still good for applying to AI jobs. Counter example: Being a junior sys admin for 10 years who dabbled with a bit of AI on the side and then applying to an AI director role probably won’t fly.

You have to dig deep during the interview to suss it out. Don't make judgement calls right from the get go.

Having said that, I've heard from multiple recruiters and other engineering leaders: you have to deprogram people with long Amazon tenure. I guess Amazon really does a number on people from warehouse to codebase.

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